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PodCastle 616: DOUBLE FEATURE! Telomerase; Mycelium

03.03.2020 - By Escape Artists, IncPlay

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* Authors : Ian Muneshwar and Eleanor R. Wood

* Narrators : Sienna Tristen and Jen R. Albert

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh

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PodCastle 616: DOUBLE FEATURE! Telomerase; Mycelium is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG-13. “Telomerase” was previously published in An Alphabet of Embers. “Mycelium” is a PodCastle original.

Telomerase

By Ian Muneshwar

You lost your first word when I began to lose my hair.

You brought a wicker basket to the hospital and opened it in the waiting room, taking out a blue-checkered blanket that you spread out over our laps. Inside the basket there was a book of Greek myths and two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into crustless triangles, just how you used to make them when the kids were young.

I told you that this was silly, that cancer was no picnic, but you just grinned like you had set me up for that very joke.

When the needle was under my skin, the nausea starting in the pit of my stomach, you opened the book. You read Hades with a seething hiss that made the child across the room giggle; Zeus was a grand baritone that reminded me of what you were like when we first met, all blustering, billowing confidence.

After the first few tales you got up, saying you had to get something. Your lips tried to form the last word, to tell me what it was, but you couldn’t make the sound. I asked you to spell it out, to write it down, but the word was gone completely, even its roots burned out of your memory.

You came back with tea in one of the hospital’s Styrofoam cups. You pointed at it and tried to summon the word again; your thin lips parting, the tip of your tongue pressed to the roof of your mouth.

Tea, I said. Hot tea.

Shaking your head, you picked up the book and started where we had left off.

By the time I decided to shave my head, you had figured out the pattern. Want was the next to go. Yes and no left you while you were chopping carrots, up and down when you took the grandkids to the playground.

You were losing the simplest words first, losing them in the order you’d learned them. When you told the doctors, I couldn’t help but to see the irony, the absurdity that you, a retired professor of Classics and semiotics, should be without your words. But they only saw a riddle with no answer: it wasn’t Alzheimer’s or dementia, apraxia or aphasia—in all the pages of all their books there was no name for the way your words dimmed and vanished, one by one.

When they told us that you nodded politely and we left; you didn’t need to say anything for me to know that we weren’t coming back.

You were too clever to let language escape us so easily. In those last few weeks of chemo—when the cancer wasn’t going away but we prayed that it would after the next round and the one after that—we made a book of parallel meanings, a dictionary for a language that only you and I could understand. Beautiful became pulchritudinous, want turned to covet. For love we had a whole page: from treasure to venerate, idolize to revere.

When the nurses came through, trying to hide their confusion at your stilted dialect, I laughed harder than I had in a long time.

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